Adversaries turn into enemies in U.S. politics

American politicians are engaging in the tactical equivalent of trench warfare.

Republican and Democratic voters alike are more dependent than ever on programs like social security and medicare, but you would never know this from the way Tea Party Republicans like Sen. Ted Cruz describe Obamacare as an assault on freedom.

By:Michael Ignatieff Published on Wed Oct 16 2013

For democracies to work, politicians need to respect the difference between an enemy and an adversary.

An adversary is someone you want to defeat. An enemy is someone you have to destroy. With adversaries, compromise is honourable: today’s adversary could be tomorrow’s ally. With enemies, on the other hand, compromise is appeasement.

Between adversaries, trust is possible. They will beat you if they can, but they will accept the verdict of a fair fight. Good-faith democracy demands this.

Between enemies, trust is impossible. They do not play by the rules (or do so only as a means to an end) and if they win, they will try to rewrite the rules so they can never be beaten again.

Adversaries can easily turn into enemies. If majority parties never let minority parties come away with half a loaf, the losers are bound to conclude they can only win through the destruction of the majority.

Once adversaries think of democracy as a zero-sum game, the next step is to conceive of politics as war: no quarter given, no prisoners taken, no mercy shown.

For a long time, the language used by both sides in American politics has been inflamed by bellicose metaphors. Elected officials “tear into” their opponents, “take the fight” to them and engage — as we see clearly after almost three weeks of the federal government shutdown — in the tactical equivalent of trench warfare. Where language leads, conduct follows.

The problem is that politics is not war, but the only reliable alternative to it. Once we think of politics as war, battle cries drown out democratic persuasion. By slow degrees, belligerence and self-righteousness make co-operation impossible.

There cannot be much doubt that in the struggle to end the shutdown in Washington and in the possibility of a default on the federal debt, we are seeing what happens when a politics of enemies supplants a politics of adversaries.

Anyone who has lived in a dysfunctional or struggling democracy knows that a politics of enmity can end in rule by presidential decree or even in political violence. Americans consider such scenarios unthinkable. Yet even if the standoff over the debt ceiling does end in a deal, it will already have exacted a brutal price. Extremists will come away believing that hostage-taking might work next time. When blackmail becomes standard practice, democracy is pulled a step closer to permanent paralysis.

Some experts believe that the enmity mindset simply reflects real divisions in the society at large. Inequalities in income, wealth and opportunity have soared, the argument goes, making it impossible for ordinary Americans to respect each other as adversaries.

Other thoughtful observers argue — I think convincingly — that while factions at either end of the political spectrum do see each other as enemies, most Americans are actually not as divided as their politics makes them seem. The real problem, in this account, is the political system: districts drawn so that incumbents never face the challenge of reaching out beyond their own base; primary systems that reward extremist activists over moderate pragmatists; campaign finance rules that allow big, opaque donations by wealthy interests.

From this perspective, the politicians aren’t so much reflecting the divisions in American society as they are exacerbating them, from the top down.

The tendency is to magnify differences of policy into differences of conviction. For example, Republican and Democratic voters alike are ever more dependent on programs like social security and medicare, but you would never know this from the way Tea Party Republicans describe Obamacare as an assault on freedom.

Politicians ratchet up manageable differences of policy into conflicts over identity and value, driving party activists into closed worlds of discourse while leaving the rest of Americans feeling that “the system” fails to serve them at all. They cease participating altogether, leaving the politicians to brawl in a deserted public square.

The politics of enmity makes competition viscerally personal. The object is not to rebut what people say, but to deny them the right to be heard at all. Attack ads that deny standing have been a feature of American politics for decades. The politics of personal destruction have come to seem normal, even acceptable.

More civility and gentility — being nicer — will not cure this. What needs to change are the institutions themselves, and they will only change when the political class in Washington realizes that, just as in American football, there are some hits that are killing the game.

Saving the game means changing the rules. Until quite recently Americans believed their democracy was so exceptional that they had nothing to learn from other countries. Now, real dysfunction may make them look more carefully at how other democracies avoid gridlock. Britain, France and Germany, as well as Canada and Australia, have campaign finance rules that prevent rich cranks from funding rabid partisanship. They have rules to prevent politicians from grandstanding abuse of process in their legislatures. They have open primaries that prevent electoral capture by fanatics. If Americans still feel that other countries’ practices have nothing to teach them, they can learn from reform at the state and local level.

What’s indefensible is a political class that believes nothing better is possible — a class that benefits from enmity without realizing that the damage from it is corrosive and possibly irreversible.

Michael Ignatieff, a former leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, is the author, most recently, of Fire and Ashes: Success and Failure in Politics. This piece originally appeared in the International Herald Tribune.

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